New Jersey members of electoral college vote to re-elect Obama

A small group of New Jerseyans voted to re-elect President Obama on Monday, making the election official.

The 538 members of the Electoral College gathered in state houses across the country to fill a constitutional mandate to cast the election’s real ballots.

New Jersey’s 14 members – including former state treasurer John McCarthy, 79, of Wyckof – spent about 45 minutes in the state Senate chambers casting their ballots.

They’re the only voters in New Jersey who cast paper ballots – candidates’ names are on pre-printed cards. everyone else votes on electronic voting machines.

The results weren’t a surprise. While New Jersey electors aren’t bound by law to follow the popular vote total, the group, chosen by Democratic party officials, all voted for Obama over Republican challenger Mitt Romney and several other minor candidates.

Nationally, Obama was set to win 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206.

Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, the state’s top election official, told the electors that there work was “far more than simply a constitutional formality.”

In fact, the Electoral College represented one of the first compromises of the fledgling republic – an effort to balance the clout of large states and small states in selecting the nation’s leader and to dilute the power of a newly empowered electorate that the patrician Founding Fathers feared would steer the country toward chaos.

The number of electors in each state is equal to the number of members of Congress the state is entitled to. Washington, D.C., gets three.

Assemblyman John Wisniewski, D-Middlesex, the state’s Democratic chairman, took the occasion to tell lawmakers to continue working in that spirit of compromise.

“Let us not be afraid as we move forward to embrace the compromises,” he said.

Though the gathered politicians celebrated the Electoral College system, the state is at the forefront of attempts to reform it.

In 2008, New Jersey became the second state, after Maryland, to pass legislation ensuring that the state’s electoral votes would go to the winner of the popular vote – not the state-wide vote.

The change won’t take place unless states representing a majority of the Electoral College sign on. The move was jump-started last year when California, which has 55 electoral votes, passed similar legislation.

Currently, all states but Maine and Nebraska use a winner-take-all system of apportioning electoral votes. But those two states apportion some electoral votes by congressional district, allowing presidential candidates to split the electoral vote total.

The move is being pushed in Republican-controlled legislatures across the country, including in Pennsylvania, but has little chance of becoming law in New Jersey because of Democratic opposition.